A team of four students from South Texas Independent School District’s (STISD) South Texas Preparatory Academy (STPA) campus in Edinburg will compete in the 2015 Innovation Challenge on Saturday as part of the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA)/Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) Convention in Austin.

According to DLR Group, sponsor of the Innovation Challenge, the competition is an activity that blends hands-on learning and collaboration between students and experts to solve real-world problems.

Three high school teams and two middle school teams from across the state will compete against those in their respective categories, blending project-based learning, collaboration, and teamwork to solve a global problem.

Although teams have begun research and project preparation, students will work on fully developing their projects at the convention throughout the day on Friday, interacting with conference attendees to broaden perspectives taken into account and secure additional information to be integrated into their projects.

Students will present solutions and takeaways during breakout sessions on Saturday afternoon, with the announcement of winners to take place at a later time.

The STPA team consists of four STPA eighth-graders – Satya Holla of Mission, Ian Guajardo of Edinburg, Neil Thomas of Edinburg, and Maysam Daghestani of McAllen. They will compete against a team of four from Clark Junior High School in Princeton Independent School District.

The STPA team will be addressing the following problem statement:

The National Debt continues to grow at an alarming rate, putting economic growth into a death spiral that shows no sign of stopping. In addition, it threatens to destabilize the world economy.

Develop measureable solutions that can be enacted locally, nationally and internationally to halt the growth of the national debt over the next 10 years and reduce it to a sustainable level by the year 2045.

Every team member from each of the winning teams – one team in each division – will receive $150.